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Topic: What brands of multimeter can I trust? (Read 4438 times)

For amateur electronics and electrics, in the £50 to £100 price range.

I'm more interested in good build quality and accuracy confidence than fancy features, though I would like auto hold or min/max reading. I'm not buying twenty-quid jobs any more after suffering bad contacts and having doubts in general. Thanks.

Fluke is de rigeur at work. I have a Fluke 73 that's lasted since... ...er, forever. 1990, I think. I recently bought another meter from Charlotte which she found in her garage which is an RS own-brand thing, and that's pre-1989 - it was made in West Germany! That's a good one for kicking around the workbench at work, and for a fiver, I won't miss it if it's nicked.

Of course, if you're really Old-School you'll be happy with nothing less than an AVO.

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LWindcheetah No. 176The all-round entertainer gets quite arsey,They won't translate his lame shit into FarsiSomehow to let it go would be more classy…

The Maplins ones seem pretty OK to me. No idea how accurate they really are but nothing I've measured has made wonder if it's out. Professional ones are usually sent away somewhere once a year to be calibrated, I don't know if it's worth it (or even possible) to calibrate the £20 ones.

Flukes are nice - I always regret not stealing the Fluke that was on my desk when I got made redundant. I deserved to walk away with that after the way we were treated there!

If it's only going to be used a few times a year, one of the cheap units will be fine. The relevant electronics have improved a great deal over the years, so a unit costing as little as £5 can be perfectly satisfactory for basic hobby or DIY use.

Fluke or AVO/Megger meters are extremely durable and will provide good long-term service. If you do choose a Fluke meter, watch out for counterfeit and grey-market units. Genuine Fluke meters sold in China are much cheaper than elsewhere, but have no warranty outside of China - they're of no poorer quality than other Fluke meters, but you're on your own if you need repair or calibration.

I have a Maplin "WhiteGold WG022" multimeter which cost me a distinctly non-trivial amount of money back when I was 16 or so. The killer feature for me at the time was the ability to measure frequency (oscilloscopes being unobtanium in a pre-eBay world without access to the right kind of skips). It's served me well - though truth be told, I have an assortment of cheapo <£5 multimeters that probably get more use, on account of being more readily to hand when I need them. 90% of multimeter jobs are continuity testing (don't buy one that doesn't beep), and the rest are mostly resistor/capacitor identification (the stupid stripes are too small for me to see in colour) or battery voltage checks, none of which call for high degrees of precision.

I generally dig it out if I need the max/min hold feature. That's something that's well worth having, IMHO. Expensive fuses for the low current range are a pain in the proverbial, though.

I also have a semi-cheapo multimeter (which feels really plasticy) with an RS232 port on it. It's come in handy at least twice for logging the performance of battery charging/discharging type circuits. It's also got a backlit display, which is the sort of thing that only comes in handy when you're having a bad day.

And then there's my lightweight racing multimeter: Only does voltage and resistance. Not very precise and probably not very accurate. Runs off a pair of hearing aid batteries. Small and weighs bugger all. I believe it may have been an 80s RadioShack creation. An excellent multimeter for touring/audax.

While I'm sure that Fluke win hands-down on quality, I can't help thinking the two important criteria for good multimeters are sturdy build and proper calibration, which are orthogonal.

I am tempted by one that does frequency and capacitance rather than just basic AVOT

My Maplins one does that, and also a transistor tester. Can't say I've used any of those features, despite being an electronics hobbyist (building guitar effects pedals mainly). 99% of the use is continuity, voltage or resistance (double checking colour codes). It's a Precision Gold Academy PG-012, I think it was about £15 or so.

O.oh I've never used for continuity, is that a special feature on some or a generic thing?

Anything that measures resistance can be used to test continuity. Most half-decent multimeters have a beeper that sounds on the low resistance range when the reading is within range. Useful for checking cables where you need four hands and two sets of eyes to keep the probes in the right place, before you try looking at the display.